From Citizens to Subjects

From Citizens to Subjects PDF

Author: Curtis G. Murphy

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822964629

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From Citizens to Subjects challenges the common assertion in historiography that Enlightenment-era centralization and rationalization brought progress and prosperity to all European states, arguing instead that centralization failed to improve the socioeconomic position of urban residents in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth over a hundred-year period. Murphy examines the government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the several imperial administrations that replaced it after the Partitions, comparing and contrasting their relationships with local citizenry, minority communities, and nobles who enjoyed considerable autonomy in their management of the cities of present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. He shows how the failure of Enlightenment-era reform was a direct result of the inherent defects in the reformers' visions, rather than from sabotage by shortsighted local residents. Reform in Poland-Lithuania effectively destroyed the existing system of complexities and imprecisions that had allowed certain towns to flourish, while also fostering a culture of self-government and civic republicanism among city citizens of all ranks and religions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the increasingly immobile post-Enlightenment state had transformed activist citizens into largely powerless subjects without conferring the promised material and economic benefits of centralization.

From Subjects to Citizens

From Subjects to Citizens PDF

Author: Sarah C. Chambers

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0271042575

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Offering a corrective to previous views of Spanish-American independence, this book shows how political culture in Peru was dramatically transformed in this period of transition and how the popular classes as well as elites played crucial roles in this process. Honor, underpinning the legitimacy of Spanish rule and a social hierarchy based on race and class during the colonial era, came to be an important source of resistance by ordinary citizens to repressive action by republican authorities fearful of disorder. Claiming the protection of their civil liberties as guaranteed by the constitution, these &"honorable&" citizens cited their hard work and respectable conduct in justification of their rights, in this way contributing to the shaping of republican discourse. Prominent politicians from Arequipa, familiar with these arguments made in courtrooms where they served as jurists, promoted at the national level a form of liberalism that emphasized not only discipline but also individual liberties and praise for the honest working man. But the protection of men's public reputations and their patriarchal authority, the author argues, came at the expense of women, who suffered further oppression from increasing public scrutiny of their sexual behavior through the definition of female virtue as private morality, which also justified their exclusion from politics. The advent of political liberalism was thus not associated with greater freedom, social or political, for women.

Subjects and Citizens

Subjects and Citizens PDF

Author: Michael Moon

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995-06-15

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0822382393

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Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present. Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does "American literature" begin?), ideas of nation (what does "American literature" mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does "American literature" include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Bharati Mukherjee, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Américo Paredes, and Toni Morrison are discussed from several theoretical perspectives, using a variety of methodologies. Issues of the "frontier" and the "border" as well as those of coloniality and postcoloniality are explored. In each case, these essays emphasize the ideological nature of national identity and, more specifically, the centrality of race and gender to our concept of nationhood. Collected from recent issues of American Literature, with three new essays added, Subjects and Citizens charts the new directions being taken in American literary studies. Contributors. Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Lori Askeland, Stephanie Athey, Nancy Bentley, Lauren Berlant, Michele A. Birnbaum, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Julie Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Karla F. C. Holloway, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Ladd, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Maggie Sale, Siobhan Senier, Timothy Sweet, Maurice Wallace, Elizabeth Young

From Citizens to Subjects

From Citizens to Subjects PDF

Author: Curtis Murphy

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-07-10

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0822986043

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From Citizens to Subjects challenges the common assertion in historiography that Enlightenment-era centralization and rationalization brought progress and prosperity to all European states, arguing instead that centralization failed to improve the socioeconomic position of urban residents in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth over a hundred-year period. Murphy examines the government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the several imperial administrations that replaced it after the Partitions, comparing and contrasting their relationships with local citizenry, minority communities, and nobles who enjoyed considerable autonomy in their management of the cities of present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. He shows how the failure of Enlightenment-era reform was a direct result of the inherent defects in the reformers' visions, rather than from sabotage by shortsighted local residents. Reform in Poland-Lithuania effectively destroyed the existing system of complexities and imprecisions that had allowed certain towns to flourish, while also fostering a culture of self-government and civic republicanism among city citizens of all ranks and religions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the increasingly immobile post-Enlightenment state had transformed activist citizens into largely powerless subjects without conferring the promised material and economic benefits of centralization.

Subjects, Citizens, and Others

Subjects, Citizens, and Others PDF

Author: Benno Gammerl

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1785337106

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Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.

From Subjects to Citizens

From Subjects to Citizens PDF

Author: Taylor C. Sherman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1107064279

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The book offers a fresh and timely perspective on the broader field of early postcolonial South Asian history.

Citizen and Subject

Citizen and Subject PDF

Author: Mahmood Mamdani

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1400889715

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In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Citizens and Subjects

Citizens and Subjects PDF

Author: Tony Wright

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1134944055

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Citizens and Subjects is an essay on the nature and condition of democracy in Britain at the end of the twentieth century. It looks at the commonly held view that Britain is a model democracy, exposing it as a dangerous myth that inhibits both radical thought and actual constitutional change. The book looks at the tradition of political and constitutional thought in Britain and at contemporary political reality, revealing a wide gulf between the two. Dr Wright, a respected teacher and academic recently elected a Labour MP, considers Britain's particularly acute form of a general problem of modern government. While the nation thinks of itself as a liberal democracy, its liberalism was in fact in place well before democracy came onto the agenda. From the outset, democracy was seen as a problem by both conservatives and liberals. Constitutional issues have re-emerged on the political agenda in recent years. Dr Wright discusses the means by which we might move towards a pluralistic, open and participatory democracy; he also argues, however, that practical reforms will not be possible unless they are linked to a new tradition of radical constitutional thought.

Braceros

Braceros PDF

Author: Deborah Cohen

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0807899674

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At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros, Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often-unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.

Impossible Subjects

Impossible Subjects PDF

Author: Mae M. Ngai

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-04-27

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1400850231

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This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.